Disney Has Written Down Its “Princess Rules” for the First Time. It's No Joke — It's About Women's Rights

Feminism is an overused word by now; it has turned into a tool for opportunists. Even so, more and more people in Hollywood are talking about it.

“Care for others. Live healthily. Don't judge people by their looks. Be honest. Be trustworthy. Believe in yourself. Know right from wrong. Do your best. Be loyal. Never give up.”

Disney recently published 10 rules for the new-era princess. As you can see above, they read less like princess rules than like a model-citizen pledge or a Boy Scout oath. Nothing princess-like about them at all.

“Princess” is not entirely a compliment these days. Much of the time it comes attached to the word “syndrome,” an accusation that someone is playing at being pampered and believes she was born delicate. But Disney was not joking when it wrote these 10 rules. Look back at the early Disney princesses and the image feels dated: gentle and kind, fluent in animal-speak, performing every scene in order to wait for a prince's favor, then walking off into a happy ending together. A passive, docile figure like that sits a long way from the women who buy things today.

Disney has always been the best representative of American conservative values. Wonder Woman, a princess born at almost the same moment, carries a strong feminist charge instead. This Amazonian princess was named a UN honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women on October 21 this year, and DC also confirmed that she is bisexual.

The stereotyped Disney princess looks much more like a cultural product built to flatter mass taste. To borrow Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

All of this is changing, slowly.

The linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer once counted the lines in Disney princess films and what they said. Of the compliments the early princesses received, 55% were about their looks and only 11% about their abilities and achievements. In the years since, compliments about appearance have grown rarer. The 10 rules show the same shift: not one of them mentions looks.

Even the princess's “prop” — the prince — has changed standing enormously, from a blurry figure who came and went, to a character with steadily more screen time, to the villain in Frozen.

But Disney is still Disney. The princesses' looks and spirit have visibly changed over these decades, yet they are always a step behind the times. We have mapped the changes below. You will see where Disney's princesses part ways with other studios', and how feminist thinking has shaped the way this enormous company designs its women.

Snow White and Wonder Woman Were Born Four Years Apart. Why Are They So Different?

In 2000, Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, gathered the most popular princesses from Disney's animated films and launched Disney Princess as a marketing lineup.

The three earliest princesses came from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). They were harmless — like the early Bond girls, the Indiana Jones leading ladies or Princess Leia in Star Wars, they existed as screaming eye candy. In calm times they chatted and sang with the animals; in danger they waited to be rescued; and once they reached marrying age (or before it), they won a prince's favor. Then they married. That was all.

Wonder Woman, born only a few years after Snow White, became a feminist figure who broke her constraints.

That may be exactly because she was born in the “We Can Do It” years. The Second World War was on, and women were leaving their homes for factories to supply the men at the front.

The tough-guy comics that came before her — Superman (1938), Batman (1939), Green Lantern (1940) — were full of violent characters and plots, and more than a few of those characters were drawn with a whiff of fascism. That set off the anti-comics movement of the 1940s.

Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, was handed the job of calming the crisis. Hired as a consultant by the publisher that became DC Comics, he created the first female superhero. In his own words, Wonder Woman was “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

Snow White, by contrast, opened during the Great Depression, when a bewildered American public needed precisely this kind of fairy-tale comfort. Even the romantic comedies of the day made their leads middle class or the children of rich families, catering to an audience that wanted entertainment as a brief escape from everyday poverty.

Cinderella, released just after the war, arrived on time too. Cinderella proved once again how well the princess brand worked as a sedative for postwar trauma. Soon after, while everyone was soaking in the prosperity of the postwar “affluent society,” the conservative mood that comes with material comfort sent women back into the home to take up the role of suburban housewife, and swept them, knowingly or not, into America's baby boom.

History suggests, though, that these perfect but boring princesses only healed audiences living through traumatic times. Sleeping Beauty, released in 1959, drew a distinctly mild response compared with Cinderella, which had earlier saved Disney from bankruptcy.

So Disney set aside the idea of making another princess for a while.

Hollywood Gave Black Actors Equal Standing More Than 20 Years Before Disney Put a Non-White Princess on Screen

Disney's princesses went quiet for a full 30 years — exactly the years when the West's second-wave feminism and the Black civil rights movement were at their height.

Not until 1989 did the first princess of the Renaissance era return to public view.

In that era, Disney's sense of women's status, and what it said about it, reached a new stage: the heroines began to rebel against patriarchy and social expectation.

You can see it in the characters around the princess. The stock prince of the early films, whatever shape he took, only had to be handsome, rich and charming. He came and went quickly, with little screen time, the ultimate prize for the princess's purity and goodness and the source of her happy life.

Now the prince's screen time grew and his thin outline filled in. He began to exist as an actual person rather than a tall, good-looking shadow.

Prince Adam, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast (1991), was probably the most radical break of them all: a cursed prince who also took on the job of being rescued by the heroine.

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel does not wait passively for love the way her predecessors did. She is reckless, and she goes after it. The New York Times called her a “spunky daredevil.”

Even that progress lagged behind the feminism being argued for at the time. Ariel still fixed her eyes on a man and remade herself into what he wanted. Gloria Steinem, editor of the famous feminist magazine Ms., put her view of the sexes this way: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Disney's first princess of color, meanwhile, arrived decades after Hollywood had opened up to actors of color — a real lag.

In 1968, in Star Trek: The Original Series, Uhura, played by the Black actress Nichelle Nichols, held a position nearly as important as the white men's, and she and Kirk gave American television its first interracial kiss.

For a Black civil rights movement then only halfway through, this was a jolt. It meant Hollywood's whole system of speech, built around white male stars, was starting to shake, and minority actors were breaking out of the housewife, the small-time crook and the brainless, gaudily dressed best friend.

In an NPR interview, Nichols recalled that Whoopi Goldberg — then nine years old, later a winner of the Emmy, the Grammy and the Oscar — turned on the television, saw Star Trek, and ran through the house yelling: “Come quick, come quick, there's a Black woman on television, and she's not a maid!”

More than 20 years passed before Disney gave a film a non-white heroine. The first non-white princess, Jasmine in Aladdin, appeared in 1992. She defies the marriage her father has arranged, runs away from home and falls in love with the pauper Aladdin. Unlike the single love line of the old-school princesses, Aladdin began to examine love and marriage more fully. Still, in many people's eyes, once Jasmine runs away her real flaw shows: beautiful and naive.

Two other princesses solved that problem: Belle and Mulan. It is worth noting that both films, the ones that traveled furthest down the feminist road, were written by women.

Linda Woolverton, who wrote Beauty and the Beast, modeled Belle's personality on Katharine Hepburn's character in Little Women and designed her as a feminist model. In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Woolverton said: “They are all strong, active, book-loving women.” Mulan was written by the Chinese American screenwriter Rita Hsiao, and the film won Best Writing at the Annie Awards, animation's highest honor.

The New Princesses' Self-Awareness Keeps Growing More Varied. They Ask “Who Am I?” and “What Am I Looking For?” — Which Turns Princess Films Into Gender-Neutral Work, Because That Confusion Is the Same for Everyone

The Renaissance princess had long stopped being a burden; she could rescue other people. The princesses of this period gained a power of a different kind.

Frozen was so popular that Elsa and Anna are usually pulled out and treated as a category of their own, but Elsa clearly belongs in this discussion as the best feminist among Disney princesses.

Before Elsa took her final form she was written as a standard villain, a stock cold-hearted sorceress. Only after the theme song “Let It Go” was written did the team rework her into a strong woman who begins torn and misunderstood and then goes looking for her true self.

Early concept art of Elsa, and Elsa as she appears in Frozen

Elsa's line to Anna — “You can't marry a man you just met” — would probably leave the old-school princesses with nothing to say.

Elsa's original identity as a sorceress calls up Lilith: in biblical legend, Adam's first wife, who came before Eve and was likewise shaped by God out of clay. She may be the earliest “feminist.” The first Jewish feminist magazine was even named Lilith.

In this film the prince also overturns his usual role and becomes the villain. A prince is no longer even standard equipment for a princess. Not long ago, hashtags like #GiveElsaAGirlFriend kept appearing on social media (Captain America's fans had called for #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend). Even Idina Menzel, Elsa's voice actress, replied to it.

At this stage, princesses whose helplessness and complicated inner lives get excavated are plainly more popular, because they read as people. In the past few years, memes of Snow White snorting cocaine and swearing were briefly everywhere, forcing a princess with no visible blemish into the shape of a rebellious dark-side teenager. Beyond the joke, taking Snow White apart may mean people find the flawless princess of this patriarchal order unreal.

Judging by the current enthusiasm for actresses with a commanding, dominant air, what people really like are women who keep their tomboy edges and work to keep pace with men while holding on to the “feminine qualities” that appeal to straight men. They pull off the rare trick of being both ahead of the curve and behind it, keeping their image smooth. The dark Snow White seems to fit: she has a coarse side, but the beauty of her feminine qualities lets people convert that “flaw” into a kind of distinctive charm. Whatever the psychology behind it, we would rather watch a slightly cool, ordinary woman who has a story.

Unhappily, that deconstructed Snow White was picked up by the women Chinese internet users mock as “pastoral feminists,” as a badge meaning: I drink, I smoke, I swear, and I am still a good girl.

The princess stories of this new period tell audiences something different from the old Disney films. Instead of how to sit and wait for true love to knock, they are about the princesses waking up to themselves and going after their real selves: Who am I? What is my dream? How do I get there? By this stage Disney's princess films are no longer films about one gender. They have become gender-neutral work, because that confusion belongs to men and women alike.

How Feminism in Film Kept Escalating

The recent princess films, Frozen and Brave among them, owe their progress not only to a shift in social thinking but to the fact that women were steering.

Brenda Chapman, who wrote Brave, put her own demands into the film; she said she wanted to break down stereotypes about women.

Hollywood films of the same period had long since been conquered by feminism.

In Mad Max: Fury Road, the real hero is not a muscleman but the iron-willed avenger played by Charlize Theron, Imperator Furiosa. She educates the wives the warlord has enslaved, with a squad of motorcycle-riding old women behind her.

Production teams are not the only ones. Hollywood stars have joined the wave, stepping forward to declare themselves feminists.

The actress Geena Davis has spent years petitioning industry leaders, spending her star power and piles of data to win gender equality in the business. In 2013 she ran a study of Hollywood's film roles and the people behind the camera. The data showed that in Hollywood family films, only 28.3% of characters were female.

She also helped bring about Inside Out, a Pixar film with no princess dreams in it at all. It was Pixar's second film about a woman, after Brave.

Behind this deliberate pushing there may be a plainer reason: studios have found that balancing gender, race or sexual orientation pays (or at least costs nothing).

Hollywood's voice was once controlled by white male stars because studios always treated white viewers as the main target. Given the enormous cost of making films there, studios will not change much without solid evidence that a more adventurous film can still make money.

That is clearest at Disney. Animation takes even longer to make than live action, so it obviously takes the safer road — which is exactly why Disney is always a beat behind on feminism.

Meanwhile, groups once treated as niche — people of color, gay people and others — have become a force no one can ignore. Hollywood production companies have to consider their feelings if they want to sell them tickets. So groups and platforms that discuss sex, gender and pop culture, like Ms. and Jezebel, have started to shape what studios choose. Girl-Wonder.org, for one, twice helped get Warner Bros. to hire a female director for Wonder Woman.

But as political correctness has intensified, Hollywood's feminism has turned somewhat hollow.

Plenty of films simply jam a woman who can fight into the plot, a woman who sneers at every other man. The laughable part is that this move, which only pleases fake feminists, has hardened into a formula.

That perfunctory formula has also produced a great deal of confusion about feminism. Some people have gone so far as to try to pry apart nüxing zhuyi and nüquan zhuyi — two Chinese words for feminism that differ only because of how each was translated — and treat them as two ideas: nüxing zhuyi the moderate one, nüquan zhuyi the radical one. And what they call radical nüquan zhuyi is very often just opportunists, unhappy with their own circumstances, throwing up both hands in support of every feminist topic that comes along.

Even Wonder Woman, with her new ambassador's title, is regarded by some as a feminist failure. The comics historian Tim Hanley writes in Wonder Woman Unbound: “Wonder Woman's creator, Marston, wanted to spread a sense of female superiority among his readers. Marston did not believe men and women were equal; he believed women were far better able than men to bring about a just and peaceful society, especially during the Second World War.” What Wonder Woman insists on is women's superiority over men, which still lives inside a male order in which one side subjugates the other.

Actresses queuing up to call themselves feminists have also been faulted for merely chasing the fashion for political correctness.

Andi Zeisler, a pioneering feminist scholar, argues that the fashion for declaring yourself a feminist will not last, and that actresses are only picking up a good-looking feminist label — branded feminism — and sticking it on themselves.

Zeisler said: “Championing social causes has become a trend. It's like a decade ago, when environmentalism was briefly all the rage in Hollywood.”

Behind this wave of political correctness is a virtue signal celebrities are sending out: I am not only famous, I sense this world, I care about this world.

Cover image source: SophiaAmanda - DeviantArt, Wikia